 Hey everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation featuring Ahana on your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me today. Stephen Mead joins us, the Presto Foundation Governing Board member, co-founder and CEO of Ahana and Girish Baliga, Presto Foundation Governing Board Chair and Senior Engineering Manager at Uber. Guys, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. So, Stephen, we're gonna dig into an unpacked Presto in the next few minutes or so. But Stephen, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges with the open data lake house market. What are some of those key challenges that organizations are facing? Yeah, just pulling up this slide, what we see is that many organizations are dealing with a lot more data and very different data types and putting that all into, that's traditionally as the data warehouse, which has been the workhorse for VI and analytics traditionally. It becomes very, very expensive and there's a lot of lock-in associated with that. And so what's happening is that people are putting that the data, semi-structured and unstructured data, for example, in cloud data lakes or other data lakes, and they find that they can query it directly with a SQL query engine like Presto. And that lets you have a much more flexible approach to dealing with getting insights out of your data. And that's what this is all about and that's why companies are moving into a modern architecture. Girish, maybe you can share some of your thoughts on how Uber uses Presto for this. Yeah, at Uber, we use Presto in our internal deployments. So at Uber, we have our own data centers, we store data locally in our data centers, but we have made the conscious choice to go with an open data stack. Our entire data stack is built around open source technologies like Hadoop, Hive, Spark, and Presto. And so Presto is an invaluable engine that is able to connect to all these different storage and data formats and allow us to have a single entry point for our users to run their SQL engines and get insights rather quickly compared to some of the other engines that we have at Uber. So let's talk a little bit about Presto so that the audience gets a good overview of that. Steven, starting with you, you talked about the challenges of the traditional data warehouse application. Talk to us about why Presto was founded, the open source, the project. Give us that background information, if you will. Absolutely, so Presto was originally developed out of the biggest hyperscaler out there, which is Facebook, now known as Meta. And they donated that project to an open source and donated it to the Linux Foundation. And so Presto is a SQL query engine, distributed SQL query engine that runs directly on open data lakes. So you can put your data into open formats like Parquet or C and get insights directly from that at a very good price performance ratio. The Presto foundation of which Girish and I are part of, we're all working together as a consortium of companies that all want to see Presto continue to get a bigger and they're kind of like Kubernetes has an organization called CNCF, Presto has Presto foundation all under the umbrella of the Linux foundation. And so there's a lot of exciting things that are coming on the roadmap that make Presto very unique. Raptor X is a multilever caching system that's been fantastic, Aria optimizations are another area. We, Ahana have developed some security features with donating the integrations with the patchy ranger. And that's the types of things that we do to help the community. But maybe Girish, you can talk about some of the exciting items on the roadmap that you're looking forward to. Yeah, absolutely. I think from Ubers point of view, just our sheer scale of data and our volume of query traffic. So we run about half a million Presto queries a day, right? And we have thousands of machines in our Presto deployments. So at that scale, in addition to functionality, you really want a system that can handle traffic reliably that can scale. And that is backed by a strong community which guarantees that if you pull in the new version of Presto, you won't break anything, right? So all of those things are very important to us. So I think that's where we are relying on our partners particularly folks like Facebook and Twitter and Ahana to build and maintain this ecosystem that gives us those guarantees. So that is on the reliability front. But on the roadmap side, we're also excited to see where Presto is extending. So in addition to the projects that Stephen talked about, we're also looking at things like Presto on Spark, right? So take the Presto SQL and run it as a Spark job for instance, or running Presto on real-time analytics applications, something that we built and contributed from Uberside. So we're all taking it in very different directions. We all have different use cases to support. And that's the exciting thing about the foundation that it allows us all to work together to get Presto to a bigger and better and more flexible engine. You guys mentioned Facebook and I saw on the slide, I think Twitter as well. Talk to me about some of the organizations that are leveraging the Presto engine and some of the business benefits. I think speed, you talked about insights Stephen obviously being able to get insights from data is critical for every business these days. We have a major, major use cases finding the ad hoc and interactive queries and being able to drive insights from doing so. And so as I mentioned, there's so much data that's being generated and stored and to be able to query that data in place at a with very, very high performance meaning that you can get answers back in seconds of time. That lets you have the interactive ability to drill into data and innovate your business. And so this is fantastic because it's been developed at hyperscalers like Uber that allow you to have open source technology, pick that up and just download it right from PrestoDB.io and then start to run with this and join the community. I think from an open source perspective this project under the governance of Linux Foundation gives you the confidence that it's fully transparent and you'll never see any licensing changes by the Linux Foundation Charter. And therefore that means the technology remains free forever without later on limitations occurring which then would perhaps favor commercialization of any one vendor, that's not the case. So maybe Grish, your thoughts on how we've been able to attract industry giants to collaborate, to innovate further and your thoughts on that. Yeah, so one of the interesting things I've seen in the space is that there is a bifurcation of companies in this ecosystem. So there are these large internet scale companies like Facebook and Uber and Twitter which basically want to use something like Presto for their internal use cases. And then there is the second set of companies, enterprise companies like Ahana, which basically want to take Presto and provide it as a service for other companies to use as an alternative to things like Snowflake and other systems, right? So, and the Foundation is a great place for both sets of companies to come together and work. The internet scale companies bring in the scale, the reliability, the different kind of ways in which you can challenge the system, optimize it and so forth. And then companies like Ahana bring in the flexibility and the extensibility. So you can work with different clouds, different storage formats, different engines. And I think it's a great partnership that we can see happening primarily through the foundation of our species which you would be hard pressed to find in a single vendor or a single source system that is there in the market today. How long it was the Presto Foundation initiated? It's been over three years now and it's been going strong. We're over a dozen members and it's open to everyone. And it's all governed like the Linux Foundation. So we use best practices from that and you can just check it out at PrestoDB.io where you can get the software or you can hear about how to join the Foundation. So it includes members like Intel and HPE as well. And we're really excited for new members to come and contribute in and participate. Sounds like you've got good momentum there in the Foundation. Stephen, talk a little bit about the last two years. Have you seen the acceleration and use cases in the number of users as we've been in such an interesting environment where the need for real-time insights is essential for every business. Initially a couple of years ago to survive but now to be, to really thrive. Have you seen the acceleration in Presto in that timeframe? Absolutely, we see there's an acceleration of being more data driven and especially moving to cloud and having more data in the cloud. We think that digital innovation is happening very fast and Presto is a major enabler of that. Again, being able to get drive insights from the data. This is not just your typical business data. It's now getting into really a quick stream data knowing about how customers are operating today. Uber is a great example of all the different types of innovations they can drive whether it be knowing in real time what's happening with rides or offering you a subscription for special deals to use the service more. So in Ohana, we really love Presto and we provide a SaaS managed service of the open source and provide free trials and help people get up to speed that may not have the same type of skills as Uber or Facebook does. And we work with all companies in that way. Think about the consumers these days. We're very demanding, right? What I think one of the things that was in short supply during the last two years was patience. And I think of Uber as a great example. I want to know if I'm asking for a ride, I want to know exactly in real time, what's coming for me? Where is it now? How many more minutes is it gonna take? I mean, that need to fulfill real time insights is critical across every industry but have you seen anything in the last couple of years that's been more leading edge like e-commerce or retail, for example? I'm just curious. Here's to take that one there. Yeah, sure. So I can speak from the Uber point of view. So real time insights has really exploded as an area, particularly as you mentioned with this just in time economy, right? Just to talk about it a little bit from Uber side. So some of the insights that you mentioned about when is your ride coming and things of that nature, right? Look at it from the driver's point of view or now we have Uber Eats. So look at it from the restaurant manager's point of view, right? They also want to know how is their business coming? How many customer orders are coming, for instance? What is the conversion rate and so forth, right? And today, these are all insights that are powered by a system which has a Presto as a front-end interface at Uber. And these queries run like, you have like tens of thousands of queries every single second and the queries run in like a second and so forth. So you're really talking about production systems running on top of Presto production-serving systems. So coming to other use cases like e-commerce, we definitely have seen some of that uptake happen as well. So in the broader community, for instance, we have companies like Stribe and other folks who are also using this stack, which is very similar to us, based on another open source technology called Pino using Presto as an interface. And so we are seeing this whole open data lake house more from just being about interactive analytics to driving all different kinds of analytics, having anything to do with data and insights in the space. Yeah, sounds like the evolution has been kind of on a rocket ship the last couple of years. Steven, one more time, we're out of time, but can you mention that URL where folks can go to learn more? Yeah, presto db.io, and that's the Presto Foundation. And I just want to say that we'll be sharing a use case at the Starb Showcase coming up with theCUBE. We're excited about that. And we're really welcome everyone to join the community. It's a real vibrant, expanding community. And look forward to seeing you online. Sounds great, guys. Thank you so much for sharing with us what the Presto Foundation is doing, all of the things that it is catalyzing. Great stuff. We look forward to hearing that customer use case. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Thanks everyone. For Steven and Garish, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.